Minor League Workhorses: 1971-1975

It’s time again to check in on the status of the hardest-working pitchers in the minor leagues. Previously, we’ve examined the five-year periods of 1946-1950, 1951-1955, 1956-1960, 1961-1965, and 1966-1970. Now we’ll plunge fully into the decade of disco, disaster flicks, and Donny & Marie.

As a reminder, in order to reveal the top end of pitcher usage levels in the minor leagues, we:

– Record the top 10 pitchers in innings pitched in each minor league classification each season
– Compute the average stat lines of these top workhorses
– Compare the year-to-year changes

Here the influence of the Mexican League, which had begun to be felt in the late 1960s, remained strong. Unlike the north-of-the-border AAA leagues (the PCL, the American Association, and the International League), the Mexican League’s franchises weren’t major league farm clubs, and thus employed many minor-league-star veterans, in the manner of US minor league teams of years past. Such pitchers dominated the AAA innings-pitched leaderboard in this era, generally being significantly more heavily-worked than stateside prospects. Nevertheless, the Mexican League aces of the early 1970s weren’t allowed to rack up innings totals as high as those of AAA aces as recently as the early-to-mid 1950s — which is interesting given that major league aces in the early 1970s were being deployed in their heaviest workloads in decades.

This level was now pure farm-club territory, and its ace pitchers were young and handled with care, in a manner similar to that which had been established in the late 1960s. While their overall workloads were about the same as in the preceding period, one slight difference is that the practice of strict role specialization was becoming more pronounced: these pitchers were deployed almost exclusively as starters, no longer handling the occasional relief stint as had long been common practice.

The change wasn’t dramatic, but ever-so-gradually the top-end workload of pitchers at this level was being reduced. For the first time it was rare to see a Class A pitcher surpass the 200-inning mark. And increasingly, as in the other classifications, these young aces were typically used in starter-only roles.

There was no significant alteration from the prior period in the workload of these youngsters; if anything it was a tiny bit more extensive. As in the higher levels, they were now rarely called upon to handle any relief assignments, and also as in the higher levels, their complete game rates remained stable at slightly below 50%.

Mexican Leaguers nearly achieved a clean sweep here. Most of these aces were Latin stars who never appeared in the majors, but Peña posted this brilliant season a few years after a brief major league career — and we also saw him last time in a top-workhorse Mexican League campaign from 1966 when he was working his way up. The total of 4,414 estimated pitches he made in 1975 was the highest of any minor leaguer at any level since 1960.

Horsford we also saw last time; I don’t know if he was from the US or not, but in any case he enjoyed a long and hugely successful career in Mexico.

“Cool Mac” McRae hadn’t been an especially hot prospect, but had spent a fair portion of the 1970 season in the majors with the Tigers.

Woodson had been in the majors before the season we see above, and performed reasonably well. His work here was more effective than it might appear, as that 4.03 ERA was eighth-best in the high-scoring PCL of 1971. Thus in 1972 Woodson would be given another chance by the Twins, and would deliver an impressive workhorse season, with over 250 big league innings at an ERA+ of 119. After that, however, Woodson would quickly fade and disappear.

All of these were major-league-bound prospects with the exception of Scott, who never made it, and Ellis, who was on the way down after having flamed out following a hugely impressive couple of seasons with the Reds in 1964-65.

But though this crew put up stalwart performances in AA, none would succeed as a major league starter. Two, however, would achieve distinction in big league bullpens: Sambito had several excellent years as a relief ace in Houston, and Campbell presented a couple of the most extraordinary mega-workhorse reliever seasons of the 1970s as the highlight of his long career.

Knepper was always a pitcher I found particularly intriguing. An easygoing guy whose best pitch was an old-fashioned overhand slow curve, Knepper was maddeningly inconsistent in terms of effectiveness (indeed he’ll be featured in an upcoming volume of Saberhagen Gaps). But in terms of durability, he was solid as granite: the Clydesdale-caliber workhorse season we see him contributing at the age of 20 above was just the first in a long line. In the minors and majors combined, Knepper would exceed 200 innings 10 times in the 13 seasons from 1974 through 1986. He almost certainly would have bagged an eleventh had 1981 not been shortened by the strike, and the two other times in that span in which he didn’t reach 200 frames Knepper worked 155 (in triple-A in 1975, after having been promoted two levels following his tremendous class-A performance) and 180 (in 1982, in one of his periodic bad years). He would pitch through the age of 36, logging over 3,500 professional innings, and would never spend a day on the Disabled List.

Equally indestructible was Eckersley. At seventeen he went straight from high school to a full-time starter role in Class A, and the next year he was breezily handling the 200-inning assignment we see here. Over his extraordinary 27-season career, Eck would encounter just two DL stints, one in 1985 and another in 1989, neither keeping him out of action for more than a few weeks.

And then there’s John D’Acquisto. Possessor of a fastball in the all-time elite class, D’Acquisto did not possess the capability of placing it in the strike zone with regularity. The Giants organization supervised by owner-GM Horace Stoneham and Director of Player Development Carl Hubbell — a team with a pretty fair track record of producing top-end pitchers, including Mike McCormick, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, and Bill Hands within the most recent decade and a half — clearly felt that D’Acquisto’s development would be best served by in-game experience, and plenty of it. Following a Rookie League debut in which he walked 74 and struck out 84 in 55 innings, over the next four seasons at ages 19 through 22 Johnny D. worked 897 innings (issuing 482 walks and racking up 870 whiffs) and threw an estimated 15,321 pitches. Perhaps the arm injury he then encountered, and the degrees of arm trouble he would never subsequently escape, and which rendered him washed up by age 30, would have visited D’Acquisto anyway, but it’s certainly fair to question the risk/reward wisdom of exposing a prize prospect to that kind of workload.

Against all this drama, Aase’s story seems rather pedestrian. The season we see above was by far his best (and most heavily worked) in the minors. He would reach the majors at 22, and put together a pretty nice career as a starter and then a reliever, dealing with little more than the injury problems pitchers often face, lasting until he was 36.

More evidence, on top of that which we’ve observed already, that the connection between standout Rookie League workhorse performance and major league success is tenuous at best. Of this bunch, only Plank and Metzger (both, interestingly, Giants’ prospects) made the majors at all, and neither of them lasted very long.

I seem to recall reading, when Plank was a fringe player with the Giants, that he was a distant relative of his namesake Hall of Famer. But none of the sources I’ve searched now confirm it, so maybe it isn’t so.

One More Thing

Do you remember way back in the 1951-1955 chapter, when I noted the phenomenon of several “workhorse relievers”? They haven’t proven to be a common occurrence in the periods since, but they have been showing up from time to time, and were particularly notable in the early 1970s Mexican League.

It is an extremely intriguing manner of deploying a pitcher, that obviously never caught on at the major league level. Here is the complete list of the most extreme examples I’ve uncovered from 1946 through 1975. All of these guys were in the top ten of their league’s pitchers in innings pitched: